From Band Member to Band Saws in West Kingston

Like its owner, the lumber stored in the rafters of a former pig barn on Ray Gennari’s West Kingston property is multitalented. The boards help provide the acoustics in the recording studio that shares space with Gennari’s woodworking shop, but a stave of maple or hickory is periodically plucked down to be reworked and reborn as custom furniture. Each piece, in its own way, as unique as the original songs that appear on Ray’s bluesy new CD, Gumption and Glory.

In addition to playing the trombone and bass with such well-known bands as Roomful of Blues, the Ravers and the Sublime tribute band Badfish, Ray also is a sought-after (and self- taught) furniture maker. Working out of the 1865 farmhouse he shares with his wife, oceanographer (and singer) Sunshine Menezes, Ray custom designs and crafts everything from side tables and servers to full bedroom sets, vanities and other home furnishings. The studio, dubbed the Rocktorium of Love, is a far cry from slick: amps, drums and a vintage Hammond organ stand side-by-side with a table saw, Ray’s favorite hand tools line the walls and a half-dozen (presently un- occupied) hornet’s nests dangle from the beams.

Many artists are compulsive multi-taskers, but given his divergent interests, Ray prefers to work on a single project at a time, focusing his efforts on completing his custom furniture projects between not-infrequent gigs and band tours. On the day we visited, Ray showed off a just-finished walnut sideboard built especially to house a china set handed down to the client by her grandmother. “Most people come to me with a vague idea, and leave it to me to fill in the blanks,” he says, pointing affectionately to details like the curly walnut used for door panels, and the fact that side-by-side elements of the sideboard were cut from the same piece of wood so there would be symmetry between the grain patterns.

Ray is a perfectionist; this one piece of furniture represents six weeks of work and more than $1,600 worth of materials alone. He says his customers are people who “think knowing where something came from is neat, and the fact that it is unique is cool.” Moreover, he says, “With a little care, this is something that will last for generations. The culture has become more disposable, but there are still people who hold onto the old values.”

Ray got his start with furniture not by building things but by working

in a repair shop. “Learning why something broke is a great way to figure out how to build it better,” he explains. His approach, while rooted in function, is guided as much by the materials as by any particular design discipline. “You need to get out of the way of the wood and let it do its job,” he explains.

His work is pretty diverse: one-off projects have included a wooden housing for the underwater robot controls on the URI exploration boat Okeanos, and a set of hands-on educational play tables for the Rhode Island Museum of Science and Art. “I’d go crazy if I was doing the same thing every day,” he says with a musician’s typical restlessness. “As with music, there’s no absolute way a piece of furniture has to be done,” he says.

“There’s no set goal – you are creating until you are happy about it.”